When was the last time you heard an incredible customer story?
Chances are if you’re in a customer success role with a solid service or product, there’s a great value story or two you could pick to share with a prospect or your own leadership team. Stories give us a pathway to understanding the impact a product or service has on an end user. Used in the right context and audience, these incredible stories are “rocket fuel” for contract renewal and growth.
In this post we’ll talk about:
- Understanding the difference between personal and business value
- Asking the right questions to get value based success stories
- How to use these stories to propel expansion or renewal
Personal Value
If your product or service is providing real tangible value for an end user, this will resonate at that personal level. If you were able to set goals with your customer, you may have a good idea of the personal value tied to business challenges before verifying any outcomes.
When goal setting, you can ask questions like “if you were to achieve X, what would that mean for you on a personal level?” This gives you a head start to formulate the right check-in questions and eventually obtain a value statement once the goal has been reached.
We’ll talk more about discovery and asking goals in a future blog post. For now, let’s look at an example of personal value.
As a CSM I’ve heard the direct impact on my end users and these outcomes can be life changing.
Let’s take a look at the financial and regulatory industry.
Imagine a before scenario where you’re an accountant that prepares quarterly reports and analysis – traditionally time consuming work that requires access to disparate systems and reports scattered across public sources.
With tight deadlines on a quarterly process you regularly have to contribute extra hours every night to the quarterly project while still falling behind on existing work.
Fast forward and now imagine a process that not only reduces your manual input but increases the quality of completed work.
Your existing projects are completed on time and you’re not spending additional hours catching up.
What would this mean for you on a personal and professional level?
If you’re able to replace even one extra hour in the old process to eat dinner with your family, spend time enjoying a hobby, or help your children with homework, would that be valuable?
Boom.
At the professional level, would this accelerate your career via positive annual reviews, bonuses, or even a promotion?
Cha-ching.
That’s personal value.
The best part about this is regardless of the unique outcome, you not only create a positive influencer for your product or service, but you’ve gained trust as a valued advisor and partner.
Business Value
You should also understand the business value. This is generally easier to quantify than personal value, but both are always closely related. Remember, what would an individual gain at their company if they push the needle forward on their KPIs?
When searching for business value statements, look back to the sales process and review the initial reasons for the customer purchasing your solution.
Here are a couple of initial questions to consider:
What were the deciding factors and how are they differentiated from the competition?
What problems would the proposed solution solve?
Finally, what type of pain was associated with these problems and what personas in the company were impacted?
If you created a success plan with your customer during the onboarding process, you can leverage these goals as starter questions to understanding delivered value.
An important thing to remember however is while a success plan is one thing, asking and listening for value is another entirely. Your vision of success for your client (or even their own vision at the beginning of the engagement) may not be in alignment with the actual value they receive.
When reviewing success plan goals, you can check in during a monthly or quarterly business review with the working team. While reviewing progress and removing road blocks is a project standard, you’ll want to take that one step further and review any wins along the way.
Once a goal has been completed, a CSM should be asking the right questions before they “close out” the goal. Was there a KPI with the goal – if so, was it met or beaten? Did the goal impact other internal users and have they provided feedback? What about end users or customers?
Asking questions like these will help you to fully understand the impact. Once you’ve gathered enough information, you can formulate a value statement and read it back to the customer. Does this fully capture the outcome we were able to achieve together?
Here’s a quick formula to value statements:
[Product or service] helped [team or individuals at XYZ Company] to [benefit] with [specific differentiating feature].
As an example: CSM Success helped CSMs around the world to increase their annual renewal rates to >95% with the groundbreaking industry insights, tips, and best practices.
Like what I did there? 😉
Now if a customer brings you a value statement directly, that’s even better. Maybe it wasn’t in the success plan before, but you can ask questions to get a fuller picture. All with the satisfaction of knowing you’ve got one happy (and more importantly successful) customer.
Renewal Rocket Fuel
Truthfully, there’s a lot of important elements in a customer’s lifecycle that impact the renewal. You need to have the right things in place – a stellar support team, a rock solid product, and a seamless onboarding process, just to name a few.
But above all the most important factor is really an answer to one question:
Did XYZ solution deliver on incredible value?
Since you’re a world-class CSM, you’ve been tracking wins along every step of the way in the engagement. If the product or service has been able to address any of the challenges initially stated as a reason for purchase, you tracked it. In other words, you’ve filled up a full tank of renewal rocket fuel.
Before your buyer even begins evaluating the contract and weighing cost vs benefit, you’ve been keeping customer sponsors informed of all the great things their team is accomplishing with your product or service.
In a practical sense, this could mean something like an “accomplishments” slide during QBRs and progress check-ins on their success plan. If you’re holding an executive success review annually or twice a year, that’s also a great time to dig into a few specific examples where you can highlight the customer team’s effort.
Remember the easy formula above? Put it to use!
I’ve kept running lists and sent these out as an additional reference point to all the amazing things completed over the course of a year or two.
If you have any informal touch points with your sponsor, you can call out the day-to-day team and highlight a few accomplishments. While they may thank you for this feedback – your core users will love you for it.
When you’re within 90-120 days to renewal, you can have a more formal review with the relevant decision-making team. This should be centered not only around the value achieved over the course of the engagement, but should be forward-looking and plan for even bigger and better goals. That way you’re ready to hit the ground running for the next term.
Renewal? Check.
And did someone say expansion? 😎
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